The present application is directed towards a light weight data wiring harness for a vehicle.
Many modern vehicle applications utilize electronic sensors and controllers in their standard operations. In a typical vehicle, many of the components will require data from sensors or other components to perform their designated function. To facilitate the data transfer between components, most vehicles use a bundle of wires and interconnects, referred to as an electrical harness. The harness can contain thousands of data lines, typically constructed of copper wires, and can be heavy. In such a construction each data line has an interconnect on each end. The interconnects can be plugged into the vehicle components, and data can then be communicated through the harness to a component connected at the opposite end of the data line.
Current state of the art electrical harnesses utilize analog data transmission, requiring a dedicated wire in the harness for each component, as a wire can only transmit a single analog signal at a given time. Analog signals are used because most sensors and other components require analog data or take analog measurements. The use of analog signals further exacerbates the weight issues of the harness because analog signals require a large and complicated Full Authority Digital Engine Control (“FADEC”) to properly manage and direct all of the signals to components where they are needed.
In order to reduce the weight of the harness, attempts have been made to utilize digital communications between the components. These attempts have typically been met with failure at least in part because many of the necessary sensors and other components have not been modified to allow for digital communications.
Furthermore, due to the typical environment in which the harness would be used (i.e. a vehicle engine), electrical harnesses are designed to be rugged, and to handle widely varying conditions. The additional materials utilized to ruggedize the harness result in a further increase in weight, and the harness can, therefore, become excessively heavy. In some vehicle applications, such as with aircraft, the reduction of total weight is a design goal and the excessive weight of modern electrical harnesses runs contrary to this goal.
In order to further reduce the weight of electrical harnesses, attempts have been made to incorporate optical data communication into a harness using fiber optic cables instead of electrical data using copper wiring. In current state of the art optical harnesses, the harness has fiber optic cables for communicating data, with optical interconnects, terminating each end of the optical cable. The optical interconnects are then connected to a component incorporating a converter, which converts the data from optical to electrical data which can be used by the device. Alternately, the optical interconnects are connected to an independent signal converter, which is then connected to the component.
Fiber optic systems are also significantly more fragile and susceptible to connection contamination than electrical systems. If a piece of dirt, or grime, works its way into the fiber optic connection, it can block or partially block the light signal being transmitted from the cable to the component, and thereby complicate the data being transmitted. Because of this, current fiber optic harnesses are unsuitable for use in “dirty” environments such as automobile or aircraft electrical harnesses. As a result of the contamination issue, many attempts have been made to ruggedize the interconnects, however due to the fragile nature of optical connections, the attempts have been unsuccessful.